Don't let them make you feel guilty

Against the tyranny of false agency

Our culture is experiencing a Cambrian explosion of life optimization strategies — lifestyles, aesthetics, -ists, -cores. As social life increasingly fractures into millions of libidinal shards, everyone can now curate their interests into total obscurity, obliterating the conditions for mutual understanding and social action.

While the political and technological context for these changes are unprecedented, this trend itself isn’t exactly new. Throw back to the hippie movement in the 60’s, or punks, goths, and vegans in the 90’s (not to mention the endless stream of fad diets), and you’ll quickly realize that we live in a culture which generates personal lifestyle regimes with an almost religious fervor.

Modern Western society, especially as it owes so much to Protestantism, places an emphasis on the individual’s unique responsibility to conform their life to some higher standard in order to truly live. The calls of ‘awake!’ and ‘open your eyes!’ constantly bombard us with the injunction to act. What we eat, what we buy, what we wear, the words we use — all of them are swept up into a moral universe perpetuated by influencers, media personalities, and think pieces.

However, I’m writing today to implore you with a different piece of advice —

Don’t let the system make you feel guilty.

• Climate change isn’t your fault.

• Inequality isn’t your fault.

• Institutional dysfunction isn’t your fault.

• School shootings aren’t your fault.

• Economic chaos isn’t your fault.

• Sperm count decline isn’t your fault.

• War isn’t your fault.

Don’t let them make you feel guilty for not altering your life to mitigate the consequences of the systems and institutions run by those who benefit from them.

The people in charge of our society’s institutions of government, media, business, and education have the gall to pester you to change your life by sacrificing your time, your energy, your money, and even your family’s well being, to ever so slightly mitigate the negative impacts of their choices.

We should refuse to put up with such shameless gaslighting.

Climate change activists harangue us endlessly with a preacher’s fury — turn off your lights, recycle, take shorter showers, buy an electric car, take fewer trips to the store, drink sustainably sourced coffee, the list goes on and it seems to increase in length every day. You sit in your car on your way to your fake email job while they sit in the road demanding an end to fossil fuels

In terms of intellectual commitments, I’m much closer to these climate change activists than the majority of people (I’m betting my family’s future on collapse), But the truth is that you could meticulously plan out your life to perfectly execute the litany of sustainable practices, and it would affect exactly nothing. This is not to mention how much you would be mentally impoverished by having to make countless micro-decisions each day. Human beings only have so much bandwidth. These regimes are designed to exhaust us.

We could change all the cars and pickup trucks on the road to electric vehicles right now, and it would never outweigh the carbon being pumped out by the mining equipment pulling rare earth metals out of the ground in Africa, South America, and Australia in order to build the batteries for these vehicles. Any gains we might see would be more than wiped out by a single volcano eruption from one of earth’s 1,350 active volcanos.

Another example — my first job after college was with a SaaS company working with asphalt contractors. This provided me an inside view into the technical process of making asphalt and building roads. You would be amazed at the immense amount of waste which takes place. In order to build a road, a contractor runs 3 and 4 axle dump trucks in a loop from the asphalt plant to the job site for 8+ hours a day. The further the job site is from the plant, the more trucks they have to run to maintain their production speed. I’ve seen jobs where contractors had to run 16 trucks driving one hour each way, and they were driving back empty! This is happening every in the US for the majority of the year (the work is weather-dependent), but they can still mill (tear up roads) in the rain, and the process is essentially the same but in reverse.

I’d be remiss to pass over the media darling du jour — the war in Ukraine. The Russian and Ukrainian armies are pumping an immense amount of carbon into the atmosphere. Every tank, missile, rocket and mortar our government sends to the Ukrainian military releases more carbon than any Green New Deal could ever offset. Don’t forget the immense fleet of battleships and aircraft carriers which our government continually shuffles around the globe or the fighter jets which daily are taking off and landing. Don’t even get me started on the entire domestic and international airline industries…

Your actions are the tiniest drop in the tiniest thimble!

You need to see that. Once you do, you can start to break free.

“But Matthew, your actions individually aren’t very meaningful, but if everyone started to change their habits, it would add up to a much greater impact!”

This platitude only makes sense if individuals were in a position to where our actions altered the systems which make the largest contribution to the problem, but unfortunately, we are not.We believe the delusion that our actions can have an impact on the problem because our minds are trained to over-index on the things we are familiar with. However, the reality is that it’s the unnoticed, invisible, and autonomous structures which shape our physical environment, our economic structures, our social outcomes, and our psychic landscapes which generate the world that we live in.

There are people who are much closer to the levers of discourse, policies, and decisions, and these people realize that with that agency comes an increase in responsibility. The people closest to the solutions spend their time gaslighting us who are much further from any sort of agency, because they need to cope with their inaction in the face of the moral demand which their circumstances place on them to exercise their agency for the sake of others.

The proliferation of lifestyles in our society’s collective discourse and imagination directly correlates to our perceived lack of agency in affecting any real change in the world. As we feel more and more out of control, we more desperately manufacture and cling to personal regimes which give us the sense that we are having an impact, that at least we will be able to escape.

You are not pure, but you are not guilty.

You will never change yourself enough to change the world.

No one makes it out of this unscathed.

If each of us can start accepting that, we will be able to start making spaces for ourselves where we can cultivate the freedom to pursue what is truly good.